Fourteen revocations, seven by choice and seven for failing to file, and the strike that started here.

Trois-Rivières is the city at the meeting of the rivers, and Saint-Maurice–Champlain is Shawinigan and the valley north to La Tuque, with the parishes of Les Chenaux along the north shore; between them they have 400 registered charities. The median charity runs on $253,000, thirty-six per cent run on under $150,000, and only sixty-five on under $25,000. A Quebec charity answers to two registers, the CRA's and the Registraire des entreprises', and can go quiet on either without a word to the other.

Community benefit is the largest group, then relief of poverty, then religion, which is unusual in Quebec and has a reason: in 2018 the diocese turned its sixty-two parishes into thirteen, each with one fabrique, so the parish churches file under thirteen numbers where there used to be sixty-two. Two charities in five are in the valley riding, three in five in the city.

This year the strain is provincial funding. Le communautaire à boutte, the community sector's strike, began in Shawinigan and Mékinac in October 2025, when more than 115 organizations in the Mauricie and the Centre-du-Québec closed their doors for a week from a site facing the Shawinigan market, saying the region was short $98 million in mission funding; it then went across Quebec. In May 2026 the regional table said Santé Québec's indexation for the coming year was 1.8 per cent against inflation of 2.9, so that the funding of the region's 228 health and social-service organizations would fall in real terms. Downtown, the winter shelter on rue Royale was housing forty-five people a night against the thirty it was funded for, and had to find $1.5 million by November to buy its own building.

By annual revenue

By charitable purpose

Purpose is the category head on the CRA return. Median revenue here is $253,000; the median board has 7 members.

The model flags forty-four charities, eleven per cent, above Canada's nine, and seven of them have the stronger flag. A flag means only that an organization's filings over several years resemble those of charities that later lost their registration. Twelve of the forty-four run on under $150,000; the rest are larger, which is where the region's strain sits.

Fourteen registrations were revoked between 2022 and 2025, seven for failing to file and seven at the charity's own request, and there is no batch: fourteen notices are fourteen organizations. Two of the seven chosen revocations are the last administrative trace of decisions taken years before by larger bodies. One old fabrique surrendered its number in March 2023, five years after the civil merger that had already made it one community among four in a new parish; a religious congregation's charitable works ended in the year its Shawinigan house was sold and became student housing. The seven failures to file are small: a choir's foundation, a health association, a training centre, a video gamers' support service, a guides' federation. None is named here. In Quebec the same board can also be struck from the enterprise register, by the Registraire, after two missed annual declarations, and both can happen to the same organization in the same year.

What the Gazette does not show is the diocese. A consolidation of sixty-two parishes into thirteen left almost no trace in the 2022 to 2025 record, because the old fabriques either kept filing under the new parish's number or ended before the window opened. The record can be read only by someone who knows what was decided, and when.

A corporation constituted under Part III of the Companies Act ends by a two-thirds vote of its members under the Civil Code, a declaration of intent to the Registraire des entreprises, a notice in the newspaper, and an application for dissolution within the year, all in French. Parishes and religious congregations end under their own acts. A registered charity ends under the Income Tax Act as well, everywhere in Canada. Shawinigan has done it in public, and its simplest closure was also its smallest.

The Fondation Katherine Beaulieu was founded in 2011 by the family of a twenty-one-year-old from Shawinigan killed on Autoroute 55 by an impaired driver. For eleven years it gave talks, about 130 of them, in secondary schools, workplaces and correctional centres, often beside the Sûreté du Québec, and ran a breathalyser table at the region's events. When the pandemic stopped the talks, the board met in extraordinary session, voted unanimously to dissolve, said in public that the goals had been met and it was time to take a bow, and sent the last $6,830 down the road to the Fondation le Grand Chemin, which helps adolescents with addictions. The CRA's notice followed four days later. One family did every step of it, in order.

The city's closure was larger and harder. Spect-Arts bought the deconsecrated église Sainte-Cécile in 2010 to make it a place for performance, ran it for some years, and then could not: it stopped paying what it owed the parish fabrique on the building. In the spring of 2022 it sold the church to a buyer who took on the debt, on the condition that the building stay in community or artistic use until the fabrique was repaid, and two years later it asked for its own registration to be revoked rather than let it lapse. The church was not demolished and has reopened. The fabrique's own spokesman said the people behind it could not be blamed for believing in the project. An orderly closure is not always a success.

A charity in Quebec closes twice, once under the provincial statute that governs the corporation and once under the Income Tax Act, which governs the registration. The two have an order, and no government page sets it out.

The Critical Path sets that order out on one folded sheet, one edition per jurisdiction. The Quebec edition is in development, in English and in French, and will come as part of Foundations.

The counts are arithmetic on three public files: the Canada Revenue Agency's list of charities and their annual returns, 2011 to 2024; the Canada Gazette's notices of revocation; and Elections Canada's postal code file, which places a mailing address in a riding. A "flag" is the mark our model, Canary v3 / Distress v3, puts on a charity whose filings over several years resemble those of charities that later lost registration. It is a weak signal and we say so: about 1.4 in a hundred charities lose their registration within three years, about 2.9 in a hundred flagged ones do, and the rest carry on. We use flags to count, never to approach anyone.

A mailing address is not a service area, and 22 of Canada's 343 ridings are not yet in the postal-code crosswalk. Where a count is under five, we print "fewer than five", so that no organization can be picked out of it. The method brief has the model's validation, the counting rules, and the limits in full.

Local record, as reported: Radio-Canada, « Fin de la Fondation Katherine Beaulieu », septembre 2022; L'Hebdo du St-Maurice, « Fin de la Fondation Katherine Beaulieu », 26 septembre 2022; Le Nouvelliste, « L'église Sainte-Cécile est vendue », 17 juin 2022; Le Nouvelliste, « L'église Sainte-Cécile ne sera pas démolie », 29 juin 2022; Le Nouvelliste, « Le diocèse de Trois-Rivières divisé en 13 paroisses en 2018 », 5 février 2017; L'Hebdo Journal, « Le Diocèse de Trois-Rivières présente ses nouvelles paroisses », 6 février 2017; Le communautaire à boutte!, communiqué « Shawinigan donne le ton à une grève historique », 20 octobre 2025; Radio-Canada, « Une deuxième phase de grève et d'autres à venir dans le communautaire »; Mon Victo, « Financement inadéquat : les organismes communautaires régionaux insultés par l'indexation de Santé Québec », 8 mai 2026; Le Nouvelliste, « La halte-douceur joue sa survie », 20 août 2025; Consortium en développement social de la Mauricie et CRSA, « Portrait statistique de la pauvreté en Mauricie », octobre 2024; Registraire des entreprises du Québec.

Sources: CRA List of Charities and T3010 returns, 2011 to 2024; Canada Gazette, Part I, revocations 2022 to 2025; Elections Canada, 2023 representation order. Model: Canary v3 / Distress v3, 1 July 2026; out-of-time AUC 0.68; flag precision 2.5 to 3.3 per cent. Counting script: case-study.py; the riding-level counts it produces: case-studies-aggregate.csv. The organization-level score file is available to a reviewer under a data agreement, and the method paper on request. If you find an error in the counting, write to info@publicbenefit.ca; we will correct the case study and record it in the correction log.